Recurrency is a process of repeating one or more tasks after a pre-defined time interval. In day-to-day business life, recurrency is implemented in a variety of contexts, such as project management, resource management, and meeting management. Typically, individuals use many applications to perform their tasks, such as scheduling weekly meetings. Microsoft Outlook™ has various scheduling features related to email, calendar, and the like, which can be employed to set recurring meetings, conferences and the like.
Meetings often need to be scheduled on a recurring basis, such as every Friday or on the 15th of every month. To schedule such meetings, the user most often defines a task in Outlook™, or some similar calendaring program. The resulting meeting schedule is reflected as a set of calendar items; if the user wishes to view recurrency-related information such as start time, end time, or completion date, she is not able to view that data collectively in a calendaring program such as Outlook™. Furthermore, calendaring programs do not provide for exporting recurrency-related information in a pre-defined file format or in an itemized manner. One can export the entire calendar, or calendar events for a set period, but the recurrency of calendar items remains opaque. For automatic conversions, the calendaring program must be integrated with third party software such as SharePoint. Moreover, one cannot exclude events such as holidays; a process set to recur every Friday will remain on the schedule even if the Christmas holiday falls on Friday. Calendaring programs simply cannot cope with that level of complex recurrency.
Moreover, it is very difficult to quickly identify and view the total number of recurrent tasks in a particular month through the narrow view of a calendar, particularly when the calendar contains several tasks. A calendar view can only display a limited number of tasks on any given calendar day. Additionally, multiple recurrent tasks for different time intervals cannot be identified using calendaring programs.